Quick Links - Poets.org

follow poets.org

Search form

The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization.

“I’d say that ‘with grief with fury with action’ is a slingshot of a poem. The image at the end would be the shot. Let’s let the circular and parenthetical rhythm of the poem be the sling. It’s a poem that wakes up already in over its head, our shared situation of an overload disguised as accruing, which, in the end, is the language of our culpability. I suppose it’s also a syncopated polemic against the experience of computer screens like the one you (and I) are looking at.”—Ed Pavlić

with grief with fury with action

when we lose track of the person not to beconfused with that democratic fetish‘the individual’ when we lose track of that particlethat permeable pool of plasmathe person and take human realityto be a solid matter (most oftenmale) of people’s (often enough clottedinto mobs often enough mobs of so-called ‘democratic action’). . . JesusChrist let’s just call it conscious intentionlashed to the cleated post of muteinheritance we need to be very carefulin that situation when persons arepushed (ultimately at gunpoint)to feel that they have nothing tolose and that can feel (though most oftenit tingles numbly) like freedombut it’s not freedom is never thatwe must be ve-ry careful morecareful than anyone can actually be because it’s dangerous when it feelslike anything’s possiblebut nothing can happen verydangerous when it feelslike anything can be put immediatelyon display but somehownothing can be revealed to livein a world (so-called) whereeverything’s within reach but nothingcan be touched maybeit’s a terrible truth (quite possiblya truth of parenthood) that for any onething to be known (or touched)everything else must be complexlyfelt as if thru an infinitelysensate dilation pure aperture maybethat is the open and awestruck light of loveand it’s very simply never eversimply just that which is the spark of articulate speech an S curve pulls parabolasthru a syncro-mesh gearbox a sudden breakin low clouds off the coastand into a remorselessly gray seaof eyes pours a silver sheen a glistening pool of pain

Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?

Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there'll be nothing left with which to venture forth